How TDG Rebuilt an Aging HR System with OutSystems

Over the past 40 years, Transnational Diversified Group (TDG) has transformed itself from a shipping agency into a diverse group of businesses. Today, the organization is made up of 35 distinct companies that are engaged in activities ranging from logistics to travel and tourism to information and communications technology, among others. Collectively, those companies employ 4,000 professionals across the Philippines.

Despite its impressive track record and steady growth, in recent years TDG has faced a number of strong headwinds. The global financial crisis, an increase in natural disasters, high levels of volatility in currency exchange rates, and heightened competition are among some of the critical challenges the company is currently working to overcome. In fact, it was because of challenges like these, that TDG’s Founder and Group Chairman recently called upon employees to become more agile and adaptive.

Unfortunately, TDG’s legacy HR system didn’t live up to those expectations. It wasn’t agile or adaptive, and instead made managing critical information about the company’s 4,000 employees a difficult proposition. For example, the system didn’t integrate any payroll information. Effectively, that meant that when there were discrepancies or changes in things like employees’ hours, sick days, or vacation time, they needed to be manually calculated and entered into the system. It was a time-consuming and costly process that left the company eager to find a better solution.

OutSystems Offers a Better Way

Enter Renvi Martinez, the man responsible for developing a new solution to manage the company’s HR processes. Martinez knew that he needed to find a new development approach to developing the system his company needed. That’s because in the past, he’d seen developers turnover in the middle of development projects, resulting in unnecessary delays and restarts, not to mention lost work.

As such, Martinez wanted to find a platform that he could use to build the new HR system that wasn’t dependent on the skills or preferences of any one developer. It also had to be process-oriented and lead them to a solution that would work universally on Android, iOS, or any other mobile operating system.

Initially Martinez wasn’t sure if such a platform existed. In time, however, he discovered OutSystems and concluded that it offered everything TDG would need to build its new Human Capital Management System (HCMS). Martinez anticipated that it would take 48 weeks to build the HCMS. With OutSystems help, he soon got started.

Agility Delivered, Faster than Expected

Less than six months later, the HCMS was up in running in roughly half the time that Martinez expected. That’s largely because OutSystems eliminated the issue of developer dependency that Martinez initially sought to avoid. Plus, OutSystems agile approach sped up the delivery of changes in business logic and business requirements, not to mention changes to the user interface.

Today, the new HCMS is delivering impressive results. The company is enjoying a 65 percent decrease in payroll transaction processing time, a 50 percent increase in related production, and a 90 percent decrease in printing and ink usage. Not only that, the company has begun using OutSystems to develop other applications.

To find out more about how TDG is using OutSystems, and the impressive results that the company has gotten as a result, check out the full case study.

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